US plans to blow up moon revealed

America wanted to win Cold War bragging rights over Soviet Union

American scientists had planned for giant flash on the moon to intimidate their counterparts in the Soviet Union and to win the Cold War bragging rights over their bitter rivals.

A report in London's Daily Mail mentions that at the height of the 1950s space race, the US considered detonating an atom bomb on the moon as a display of America's Cold War muscle.

The daily claims that the secret project that was named Project A119 was never carried out. However, detailed planning had been carried out which included calculations of the ensuing behaviour of dust and gas after the blast by a science graduate.

According to the plan, a missile carrying a small nuclear device was to be launched from an undisclosed location and travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would be detonated upon impact, the daily reported.

American scientists also believed that viewing the nuclear flash from the living planet might have intimidated the USSR and boosted US confidence after the launch of Sputnik, physicist Leonard Reiffel told the AP in a 2000 interview.